Easter Island's sacred Moai statues charred in forest fire

A forest fire that tore across part of Easter Island has charred some of its fabled head statues, damaging some of them permanently.

Known as Moai, there are almost 1,000 of the monolithic statues spread across the Pacific island, which lies some 2,175 miles off the west coast of Chile.

One example housed in the British Museum has been the focus of a campaign to see it returned to its original setting.

One hundred hectares of Easter Island has been razed by flames since Monday, said Carolina Perez, cultural heritage undersecretary at Chile’s culture ministry.

"Nearly 60 hectares (148 acres) were affected, including some moai," she said in a Twitter post.

The fire is believed to have been started deliberately, and the area around the Rano Raraku volcano, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, has been the worst affected.

An estimated several hundred Moai are in that area, as well as in the quarry where the stone used to carve the sculptures is extracted.

"The damage caused by the fire can't be undone," Pedro Edmunds, mayor of Easter Island, told local media.

There is still no report on the total damage.

The devastating fires came just three months after the island was reopened to tourism on August 5, after two years of closure due to Covid.

Before the pandemic, Easter Island - which is highly dependent on tourism - received some 160,000 visitors a year, on two daily flights.

But with the arrival of Covid in Chile, tourist activity was completely suspended.

The island was long inhabited by Polynesian people, before Chile annexed it in 1888.

A Moai statue previously housed in Chile’s National Museum of Natural History in the capital, Santiago, became the first to be returned to Easter Island earlier this year, under a scheme to recover sacred objects.

The 715kg statue arrived back on the island on March 1, after a five sea voyage from Chile.